1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to electronic devices equipped with flash memories, and in particular relates to flash memory compatibility design to permit use of NAND flashes of various page sizes.
2. Description of the Related Art
Flash memory is a non-volatile computer storage chip that can be electrically erased and reprogrammed. It is generally used in memory cards, USB flash devices, MP3 players, solid-state drives, thumb drives, PDAs and so on for general storage and transfer of data between computers and other digital products.
NAND flash is one kind of flash memory. Generally, the storage space of a NAND flash is divided into a plurality of physical blocks and each physical block is further divided into a plurality of physical pages. Read and programming operations of the NAND flash must be performed one page at a time while unlocking and erasing must happen in block-wise fashion. Therefore, when designing application software of an electronic device equipped with a NAND flash, the physical page size and the physical block size of the NAND flash should be taken into consideration. For example, in a case wherein the equipped NAND flash is divided into pages of 2K+64 bytes, the application software has to be designed to access the NAND flash based on the specific page size, 2K+64 bytes, and, in another case wherein the equipped NAND flash is divided into pages of 4K+128 bytes, the application software has to be designed to access the NAND flash based on another specific page size, 4K+128 bytes. To be compatible with NAND flashes of different page sizes, the design of the application software of the electronic device is very complicated.